A data center is a facility that houses computer systems and various networking, storage, and other related components. Data centers may, for example, provide computing services to businesses and individuals as a remote computing service or to provide “software as a service” (e.g., cloud computing). To facilitate utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing machine to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computer machines to a connected computer user. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain, or delete virtual machines in a dynamic manner.
Some virtualization technologies are capable of providing virtual resources that span two or more physical resources, such as a single virtual machine with multiple virtual processors that span multiple distinct physical computing systems. As another example, virtualization technologies may allow data storage hardware to be shared among multiple users by providing each user with a virtualized data store that may be distributed across multiple data storage devices, with each such virtualized data store acting as a distinct logical data store that provides users with the illusion that they are the sole operators and administrators of the data storage resource.
In many environments, operators of data centers that implement different types of virtualized computing, storage, and/or other network-accessible resources may allow customers to reserve or purchase access to resources in various resource acquisition modes. The computing resource provider may provide facilities for customers to select and launch the desired computing resources, deploy application components to the computing resources, and maintain an application executing in the environment. In addition, the computing resource provider may provide further facilities for the customer to quickly and easily scale up or scale down the numbers and types of resources allocated to the application, either manually or through automatic scaling, as demand for or capacity requirements of the application change. The computing resources provided by the computing resource provider may be made available in discrete units, which may be referred to as instances. An instance may represent a physical server hardware platform, a virtual machine instance executing on a server, or some combination of the two. Various types and configurations of instances may be made available, including different sizes of resources executing different operating systems (OS) and/or hypervisors, and with various installed software applications, runtimes, and the like.